Monitoring Your Online Reputation as a Freelance Writer

Freelance writing is now one of the sources of income for many moms dads and others alike. As a freelance worker, they are free to serve as many clients as they can. They build reputation by submitting works on time and providing high-quality work. The reputation built will then result into new job offers or job referrals from satisfied clients and writers will have increased income.

As a writer, you can collect positive reviews from your satisfied clients. However, many potential clients today, go beyond profile reviews. They have now started to dig for more information about you. Below are the tools you can use to monitor your online reputation as a writer.

Google Search

Take time to search your name or business name frequently on Google. In this way, you will have an idea if there is new mention about your product or service. In addition, you will get to know if someone is using your articles without your permission. You may find it useless but by searching your name online, you will know if your reputation is in jeopardy.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts let you subscribe to every update for your chosen keyword or category. You can sign up for Google Alerts, and you will be immediately notified when your name is used or posted somewhere.

Google Alerts is free to sign up, so you have no excuse of not doing it for the sake of your online reputation as a freelance writer. In this way, you will not have a hard time searching for your name anymore because the alert will be delivered directly to your inbox.

Online Reputation Monitoring Services

If you are too busy to monitor your online reputation, you can try the service of those companies offering online reputation monitoring and management services.

They have the tool that provides companies the brand protection they need and defense strategies, and they always make sure that your reputation online is well managed and monitored at all times. In this way, you can focus on your service or business and leave the reputation monitoring to the experts. It can mean more time for writing and more income.

Yahoo! Site Explorer (Bing Webmaster Tools)

Use Yahoo Site Explorer if you want to monitor the external links to your site or blogs. If someone writes something about you — a negative or positive write-up — he or she will provide a link back for your site, profile or blog for her or his readers to follow and read.

Technorati

If you are into blogging, you might be familiar with Technorati or even a subscriber. Technorati is a popular search engine of blogs. It has millions of blogs indexed on a real-time manner. With the help of Technorati, you can monitor conversations or bloggers. Subscribe to Technorati’s RSS feed and you will be able to monitor if it has comments about your blog.

Delicious

Delicious is one of the popular social-bookmarking sites that many bloggers, marketers, and more are into these days. Like Google Search, you can also do a search of your name on the Delicious search box, and you will find results both positive and negative about you and your service.

Twitter

This popular social-bookmarking site will let you monitor your online reputation, because members of this site are free to express what is inside them. Subscribe to an RSS feed and be alerted when something is tweeted about you or your company.

SocialMention

This tool is perfect if you want a real-time update about what people are discussing in social media or if they are talking about you or your company. SocialMention will immediately alert you through email.

Conclusion

Building a reputation is hard. If you are an avid user of social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, make sure you only posts updates that will not send any negative message about you. Once you have built a profile, make sure to guard the gained positive reputation using the above-mentioned tools.

Olivia blogs for PsPrint, an online printing company specializing in brochure and poster printing among other popular services. Follow PsPrint on Twitter and Facebook

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Comments

That was handy. Searched my name and among the many blog and Facebook comments, I also found out a letter sent to the editor of a local newspaper, back in September, was published. That was a nice surprise.

When I wrote for the Huffington Post, I had to really massage my story to give it that UMPH and I wrote myself as the bad guy. Yeah, I got published, but I also got skewered all over the internet as a “mean girl” a la Lindsay Lohan.

Hello,
I have rearranged my blog posts at http://theoff.info/wordpress. After rearranging the posts, the following unwanted changes have taken place:
Firstly, in Archives dropdown menu (right sidebar), one extra month “March 201” has been created automatically.
Secondly, in footer copyright statement, blog start year has changed to 1969 from 2009.

Solid information, something to be aware of, especially as a writer that now the social media is the new media to keep an eye on. Building up a reputation can be a bit challenging but never less, the repeat of customers will definitely add their voices into the mix.